We Must Not Regulate the Internet Essay example

We Must Not Regulate the Internet Essay example

Essay Preview

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” ~Eric Schmidt. As CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt and his company own and operate one of the largest search engines in the world. With them earning $54 billion per year economically, and also $25 billion in the online advertising business, they understand the internet. In fact their estimated total economic influence they have had on the world, it is close to $119 billion (Ha). The internet is growing at an exponential rate. The internet has, in fact, been increasing in size since it was first started in the late 1960’s. As with any resource of this nature, however, we soon found ourselves with a problem. How are we going to keep this a free and open environment while still preventing criminals from going too far and causing other innocent people from having their property and rights violated? Due to the fact that the internet is a global network that is by nature free and open, the US government does not have the right to increase its regulation of the internet in terms of privacy, spam, and pornography.
Background: Basic Internet Infrastructure.
The internet was first started in 1969, and only consisted of four host computer systems (Tyson). Now days, the internet is huge, in fact so huge that we are currently at 95% usage of the 4.3 billion available addresses on the internet. This means that we will be moving from IPv4 to IPv6, which has an outstanding 3.4×1038 available addresses, soon to help accommodate the excess connected nodes (Shankland). Every node on the internet has an address that follows the format of four octets joined with a period such as 192.186.1.1. With IPv6 they s...

Need Writing Help?

- The Efforts to Regulate the Internet Abstract “Cyberspace is both the popular media's new darling and new demon, revealing a new, expansive intellectual horizon but simultaneously providing easy access to an infinite, virtual Pandora's box” [1]. This paper shall discuss the situations that have raised the need for the Internet regulations, and in particular, Internet content censorship. Then, it shall review the regulatory efforts worldwide, with respect to the local cultures and governmental systems.... [tags: Computers Web Technology Essays]

- Policing Cyberspace on the Internet The Internet is a method of communication and a source of information that is becoming more popular among those who are interested in, and have the time to surf the information superhighway. The problem with this much information being accessible to this many people is that some of it is deemed inappropriate for minors. The government wants censorship, but a segment of the population does not. Legislative regulation of the Internet would be an appropriate function of the government.... [tags: Internet Communication Computers Essays]

- In the United States, every child, teenager and adult uses Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, among numerous other sites, regularly. The internet is open and uncensored for the most part, other than parental controls. In China, most, if not all of those types of sites are or have been blocked. As in, you could not go to them, unless you found some way around the web filters and firewalls the Chinese government runs in their country. While China defends their practice of internet censorship, based on “protecting” the people, heavy internet censorship is a block to free speech and impedes economic and social development in the 21st century.... [tags: Internet Censorship]

- Pornography is becoming the most popular secret in all of America. Only 13.9% of young men don’t view pornography, and of those who do, 51% of male students and 32% of female students first viewed pornography before age 13 (Gilkerson). 21.3% of college males watch it daily or multiple times a day (Gilkerson). Not only has porn become more popular, it has become more available and much more explicit. Years ago, the most explicit pornography that one could access was a Playboy magazine, but today that is known as ‘softcore porn’.... [tags: Internet Pornography Essays]

- Imagine a place where you have access to anything and everything one could want. Some would say that is only existent in a utopia, and some would say that describes the Internet. Many adults go on to the net and access pornographic material that would be unsuitable for children. This is called cyberporn. The controversy lies in the fact that children are accessing these materials also. Government, activist groups, and concerned parents are fighting to regulate obscene material found over the Internet to protect children.... [tags: Internet Censorship]

- Fueled by the expansion of multinational corporations and financial institutions, technological advances, and the increasing porousness of national borders, Globalization is a persistent, multifaceted phenomenon, which has and continues to have, significant impact on economical, political and cultural relations. The book, “The Lexus and The Olive Tree” by Thomas Friedman describes globalization as not just a fade or trend, but political and economical system that replaced the cold war. Friedman explains where we are and how we get here, through a series of skillful metaphors, highly relevant anecdotes, and cogent analysis.... [tags: Outsourcing, Offshoring, Free Trade]

- The introduction of the Internet to the mainstream world has brought with it a new way of distributing information. This new distribution of information over the Internet has created a power struggle between some states and their citizens. The basic definition of power is the action of a person over another person to force the submissive person to do something he would not ordinarily do. Brian A. Connery, a professor at Oakland University who has studied power, defines power as, "Any capacity to get people to do what you want them to do." Power is evident in the relationship between a state and its citizens.... [tags: Internet and Politics]

- The Concerns of Internet Censorship As a professional Internet publisher and avid user of the Internet, I have become concerned with laws like the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) that censor free speech on the Internet. By approving the CDA, Congress has established a precedent which condones censorship regulations for the Internet similar to those that exist for traditional broadcast media. Treating the Internet like broadcast media is a grave mistake because the Internet is unlike any information medium that has been created.... [tags: Censoring Internet Rights Essays]

- Evolution of the Internet Evolution is the process Charles Darwin described – the story he told – to explain the diversity of the planet. Evolution exists in nature as the interplay between linear natural selection and random events. This randomness necessitates a nonlinear model for exploring evolution as a whole, and as randomness is increasingly recognized as the dominant evolutionary force, "evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent" (Deleuze 33). If we take a rhizome as an evolutionary model instead of a tree, this "connects any point to any other point" (Deleuze 35) and allows for nonlinear progression.... [tags: Internet Web Cyberspace Essays]

- Internet Predators In recent years, the Internet has become the number one choice for doing research. A person can find information on just about anything. There are websites devoted to cooking recipes, musicians, schools, and pornography. Many schools will even allow students to apply for admission over the Internet. Schools such as California State University, Northridge give students an option to register for classes through the school website, making it quick and easy to get classes. The Internet is truly the "information superhighway." Not everyone who accesses the Internet uses it for research.... [tags: Internet Predation]